LONDON — On a breezy day in 1992, the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra asked a local teenager in Hilton Head, S.C., to pose on the beach. Weeks later, as Ms. Dijkstra was developing the C-print, which would later appear in her series “Beach Portraits,” she had an uncanny feeling.

“I thought, Hey, this looks just like a picture I remember from art history,” she said. The girl, Erin Kinney, was holding her windswept hair with one hand, the other resting on her thigh, with one knee slightly bent. Unconsciously, she had assumed the pose from Sandro Botticelli’s 1485 painting, “The Birth of Venus.”

“It’s so ubiquitous in our culture that it was her default pose for ‘pretty,”’ Ms. Dijkstra said.

The photograph is one of about 150 in “Botticelli Reimagined,” an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum here that runs through July 3. The show explores his influence through works by pre-Raphaelite, modern and contemporary artists, as well as photographers and filmmakers.

He was lauded for his religious works, including the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel depicting Moses and Jesus. But after his death in 1510, he fell out of fashion, overshadowed by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, whom critics and collectors considered more technically advanced.

The exhibition does not feature “Venus” or Botticelli’s other most famous work, “Primavera,” completed in 1482.

“Forget about it,” Mark Evans, the exhibition’s curator, said of the chances of securing the works from their home at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. “Venus” has toured only once, as part of an exhibition organized by Benito Mussolini to drum up goodwill before World War II.

The Uffizi did lend “Pallas and the Centaur,” a 1482 painting that depicts the goddess of wisdom comforting the anguished-looking half-man, half-horse. Such mythical scenes are Botticelli’s most popular works today, but during his lifetime they were sequestered in private collections to be viewed only by a minuscule elite, Mr. Evans said.

The general public was far more familiar with works like his “Virgin and Child” series, which had more appeal to an observant Roman Catholic population than his sexualized portrayals of Greek or Roman goddesses.

Eight such Biblical scenes, painted on circular pieces of wood, hang in a row in the Victoria and Albert as a way to illustrate the difference in quality for works that Botticelli would have sold at different price points, depending on the buyer’s wealth.

In “The Virgin and Child With Two Angels,” from 1490, a strawberry blonde Mary intertwines a delicate index finger with Jesus’ hand, the boy’s rosy cheeks glowing as he gazes upon her. To his side, two boys with delicate noses hold a rose bouquet, wispy clouds behind them.

But in a circa 1500 version that would have sold for far less — the exact prices of Botticelli’s works remain unknown — Mary is decidedly less attractive. Her face remains the same, but her hair is plastered down and her shoulders are bulky. Jesus’ cheeks are flat and pallid. Only one of the boys remains, now with an enlarged nose, holding roses represented by blobs of color rather than individually delineated petals.

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‘‘Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Bandinelli,’’ by Botticelli.CreditVictoria and Albert Museum, London

“It’s like the difference between couture and ready-to-wear from the same brand: You get what you pay for,” Mr. Evans said.

Another work in the sequence was bought sight unseen in 1877 by the critic John Ruskin for 300 pounds, a substantial sum at the time. After unwrapping the work, Ruskin wrote, “It is so ugly that I’ve dared not show it to a human soul.”

Ruskin was a defender of the Pre-Raphaelites, the brotherhood of bohemian male artists and female models-cum-lovers founded in the 1840s that played a large role in Botticelli’s rehabilitation.

The artist’s secular works had emerged in the early 19th century thanks to figures like Napoleon, who seized pieces from Italian collections for France’s museums, and King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, who bought multiple Botticellis for Berlin, including a study for “The Birth of Venus.”

The Pre-Raphaelites replicated the languid, longing gaze of Botticelli’s models and reinterpreted his mythological characters to create a fantasy world that would have been instantly recognizable to collectors. The exhibition aims to show this deliberate “rebranding,” Mr. Evans said, by showing preparatory works by the Pre-Raphaelites and comparing the finished products to Botticelli’s work.

Portraits like “Woman at the Window” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a pastel from 1870 that shows the Pre-Raphaelite model Jane Morris, curly hair tied loosely back, staring dreamily into the distance, reflect Botticelli in both style and subject.

A gap in the wall reveals in the adjacent room Botticelli’s “Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Bandinelli,” which Rossetti acquired in 1867.

When curators restored the painting, the Victoria and Albert’s only Botticelli, they discovered via an X-ray that her right eye had been slashed out at some point and later repaired. Although the woman’s attire is modest, the reason for the vandalism appears to be her direct gaze: When the portrait was painted, around 1470, polite women were expected to keep their eyes lowered in public.

“Smeralda Bandinelli” also demonstrates the volatility of Botticelli’s auction market that continues today.

The painting’s whereabouts were unknown for decades, but it was eventually bought in 1865 by an art dealer for 135 pounds, who sold it at a Christie’s auction two years later to Rossetti, who paid just 20 pounds. The artist later sold it for 315 pounds.

The difficulty in clearly distinguishing paintings created primarily by Botticelli and those created with help from studio assistants is the main reason why the sale price for his works is comparatively low, generally between $1 million and $2 million, said Nicholas Hall, a specialist at Christie’s.

The contemporary works in “Botticelli Reimagined” mostly treat the artist with reverence, reflecting what Mr. Evans said was his contribution to modern notions of beauty. “You can see it in Botticelli’s mythical works and in modern art and marketing: the enduring idea that blondes have more fun,” he said.

A notably irreverent interpretation is the photographer David LaChapelle’s “Rebirth of Venus,” which continues the debate between admirers of Botticelli and those of Michelangelo, who generally view Botticelli as saccharine. Mr. LaChapelle’s 2009 C-print shows two men, their taut muscles slick with oil, adoring a model in sparkly heels.